Nashville-based dream-pop outfit Wild Heart Club has released their debut LP Arcade Back In Manitou. Singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Kristen Castro, the creative force behind the band, is a genre-crossing artist known for blending a surprising range of electronic, digital, and analog elements into her dreamy, atmospheric indie-pop. She built a name for herself as an independent solo artist with a penchant for electric guitar, a dark sensibility, and a bracing tenderness reminiscent of acts like the Cocteau Twins.
The album, an ethereal and lush collection of melancholy tracks with a brilliant gloss of retro sheen, explores a gamut of emotions—lows like processing the effects of a toxic relationship and navigating being gay while trying to love someone who wants to keep the relationship a secret, and highs like reveling in the magnetism of undeniable chemistry with the one you love and learning to forgive.
“I never let myself fully produce or write the way I wanted. I felt like I had something to prove and I was always watering down what I had to say or not putting myself first musically,” she reveals. “Being in such a deep place of loss made it easier to be honest. I wrote this album to help myself out of a really dark place. I left a band I was in for 6 years in 2018 and then went through a breakup in 2019. For a month in 2020, I broke down and wrote these songs. I had zero intention of an album coming about but am happy it worked out that way.”
There’s a genuine and hopeful engagement with the positive, a buoyant, almost-ironic sense of cheer teeming from the instrumentation throughout and a spirit of experimentation and discovery, despite the themes of loss the lyrics explore. The album’s title track is a fine example - a beautiful song about revisiting a place full of happy memories after the end of a relationship. “My ex loved everything Colorado because she’s from there - one of my favorite moments was running from the rain in downtown Manitou Springs and finding cover at this penny arcade. I didn’t really think of that memory a lot so I was surprised when the idea came about,” Castro explains. The song’s accompanying video filmed in and around the actual Arcade in Manitou Springs, Colorado, was featured exclusively at The Colorado Springs Gazette and offers a glimpse into the area’s ethereal landscape.
